Word Play - Social media parlance

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Friday, May 20th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

A week from now we’ll have our regular Listener Feedback segment. So if you have something to share with us, please do! We prefer an audio file that you record on your smart phone and email to us. You can find instructions for that at wng.org/preroll. But if you want to phone it in, you can do that too. Our listener feedback line is 202-709-9595.

Well, now it’s time for our once-a-month visit from our wordsmith, George Grant, for Word Play.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: The proliferation of internet technologies has created what our Anglo-Saxon forebearers might have called a “word-hoard.” The avalanche of innovative digital apps, blogs, podcasts, livestreams, and social media platforms has spawned a treasure trove of vocabulary words necessary to describe this new communications ecology.

We Instagram and Hologram. We Zoom, we Skype, and we Vimeo. We TikTok, Signal, and YouTube. We Google, Gab, and Dropbox. We SnapChat and WhatsApp. We DM and IM. We FaceBook and FaceTime. We ask Siri and Alexa.

Our culture is increasingly shaped by “hashtags,” “memes,” “trolls,” “flamers,” “spammers,” and “geeks.” Reputations are made, unmade, and dismayed by “klout scores,” “lurkers,” “avatars,” “clickbaiters,” “likes,” and “LOLs.”

The popular microblogging platform Twitter has been a particularly fertile field for clever neologisms. It has given birth to a veritable “twitterverse” of new words from “tweetcred” “twittiquette,” and “twitlit” to “twisticuffs” “twiddle” and “tweeple.” When billionaire Elon Musk made a $44 billion offer to buy the company, an apocalyptic “twitterstorm” erupted. When India’s contestant in the Miss Universe beauty pageant was outed for tweeting excerpts from a published article as if the words were her own, she was accused of “twagiarism.” And before he was banned from the platform, President Trump was regularly criticized for his “twitiarrhea.”

Created by tech entrepreneurs Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in 2006, within five years Twitter had garnered more than 100 million regular users. Five years after that it had more than 300 million and was heralded as the world’s public square.

According to Dorsey, the men originally designed the platform as an internal messaging system for their podcasting company Odeo. During a brainstorming session, they weighed various names for the service. Browsing through a dictionary they came across the word “twitter,” defined as “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.”

Novelist @NeilGaiman captured the essence of both that definition and its namesake technology asserting, “I tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140-character chunks of instant events and predigested gnomic wisdom. Oh, and swearing.” Maybe that is why novelist @TeresaMedeiros declared, “Twitter is the perpetual cocktail party where everyone is talking at once but nobody is saying anything.”

I’m George Grant—not @anything; just George Grant.

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